The lessons of Milosevic. Coddling monsters has a price

Too many people, for too long, said "better the devil we know"

GIVEN that he was such a dark, malign personality, why did so many people, in Serbia and further afield, tolerate him for so many years? That is one question historians will ask about Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia who died in his prison cell in The Hague on March 11th (see our obituary, )page 91.

It's not all that hard to see how he took power in the first place. Post-communist chaos, the collapse of old Yugoslavia, Serb grievances: all this was a gift to a demagogue. But why, as he started wreaking havoc across the Balkans, were people slow to see his ghastliness?

Even if Serbian voters were ignorant of, or indifferent to, the mayhem going on in Croatia and Bosnia, didn't they realise the Milosevic regime was stealing vast amounts of their money? In a country like Serbia with a talented, cosmopolitan middle class, how did Mr Milosevic's sleazy kleptocracy keep a power base for so long? Part of the answer, of course, is that no nation, however "civilised", is immune to fascism.

But quite apart from the Serbs, there were plenty of other people who seemed to prefer Mr Milosevic to any conceivable alternative. One was the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman: once they had stopped fighting one another (and reinforcing each other's nationalist fury), the Serb and Croat leaders colluded to carve up Bosnia. Later, as Kosovo's war loomed, some Kosovar leaders openly said they preferred to have Mr Milosevic in Belgrade rather than any softer Serb politician: the tyrant's ugliness lent weight to their cause. Indeed, the Kosovars could have voted him out by ending, just for a day, their boycott of Serb politics, but they left him be.

Nor were all the people who condoned Mr Milosevic from the Balkans. Plenty of western leaders were hesitant to challenge him, and there were clear reasons for their queasiness.

Perhaps a show of force at the start of the Bosnian and Croatian wars could have nipped the conflicts in the bud. But once Bosnia's horrors started unfolding, there seemed no easy way to make a "storming intervention" without paying a huge human and political cost. So the West tried to contain the war--by treating with Mr Milosevic. He was induced to turn the screws, at least partially, on his proteges in Bosnia, and duly rewarded.

In 1995, when hundreds of peacekeepers were taken hostage by the Bosnian Serbs, Britain and France were desperately grateful to Mr Milosevic and his security chief, Jovica Stanisic, for negotiating their release. In those days, many Americans used to scorn the Europeans as soft-minded appeasers. But then America struck a Bosnian peace deal that made Mr Milosevic not just a partner, but a privileged one. At the time, that looked like good statecraft--and in fairness to the Dayton accord, it was a clever mixture of short-time partition and long-term reconciliation. Rightly or wrongly, Mr Milosevic was deemed integral to the deal.

And he was paid off: after Dayton, the Milosevic regime raked in hundreds of millions of dollars by privatising Serbia's utilities--transactions that could have been stopped by one wag of an American finger. Only in 1999, as Kosovo's tragedy deepened, did western policy shift towards confronting the Serb bully. Even as NATO's bombs fell, many Serbs thought the West was being careful to spare their leader, who would soon be needed to make peace. And so he was--even though, soon afterwards, he faced war-crimes charges. A bit late, many said: the intelligence data about Serb crimes in Bosnia and Croatia which shaped the indictment had been available for years--why were NATO governments so slow to hand it over?

Those tempting tyrants

In fact, the dilemma Mr Milosevic posed to western policymakers is pretty common. It can arise in any regional war where drastic intervention looks hard--either because voters lack the stomach, or because the human and military costs look too high. In such a case, politicians will ask, what alternative is there but to "sup with devils" and strike deals?

And in any war zone where chaos or catastrophe looms, a tyrant with enough power to strike and deliver bargains is a tempting interlocutor. But remember--today's deal-maker on one front can become tomorrow's trouble-maker on another; and confronting a monster may ultimately be harder if you have spent many years playing down his monstrosity.

Take Saddam Hussein. America's case for overthrowing him, on grounds of his egregious wickedness, would have had more legitimacy if he had not been treated, two decades earlier, as a good pawn in the game of containing Iran. That is not just an ethical point; coddling tyrants has strategic costs too. In a diabolical world, you may have to sup with devils some of the time. But don't sit too long at the table, or offer too many tasty dishes--especially if you expect to fight them one day.

Editorial discusses the legacy of Slobodan Milosevic following his death on the 11 March 2006.